102: Man
by Werewolf's Oneshots
Summary: Man is a strange animal, and he doesn't like to read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it. :::Adlai Stevenson


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_Man: a being in search of meaning. -Plato_

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"What could a little bite do?"  
Nothing, he knew. Yet what was the new presence in his blood?  
"You're alive, that's what's important."  
More important than his sanity? His soul?  
"You'll feel right when you get back to London. Get some real medical attention."  
But the gypsy's gaze followed him as his coach departed, and the words were worth nothing.

•  
_Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.  
-Albert Camus__  
•_

He returned to London, shedding the wilds of the Blackmoor woods. The country was a place for wretches and animals. The city was full of life, human life that raced through the street-veins to its heart. Human, no hell curses or surreptitious gypsy folk. He walked the streets and watched the people. Window shoppers and fancy restaurants were around every corner. Chaffed signs hung above doors that did nothing to keep the elements out of bars and tailors. In the heart of the city the only foliage was potted shrubs and placed trees, both trimmed in a decorative fashion and kept conveniently small and under-grown. No tall weeds to stalk prey, no gullies to take shelter in.  
This was no place for the dire wolf of the moors.  
Detective Abberline felt unsettlingly incongruous.

The woods lingered on his clothing. He had discarded his shredded, bloodied garbs the night of the incident. But every bit of cloth that had been with him on the hunt smelled like wilderness. He had them washed half a dozen times. Each time they returned he would press his nose to the fabric and inhale deeply, and every time there would be a terrifying, feral trace. It was a caveat of doom, that scent in his nostrils. He threw them into his fireplace.  
He thought of complaining to his maidservant. But they couldn't smell it, could they? Not the rest of the human world.  
He bought new garments, resplendent and high dime. Monsters did not wear expensive clothing.  
The fabric was constricting and grating on his skin.

•

"_I will not dwell upon ragouts or roasts,  
Albeit all human history attests  
That happiness for man — the hungry sinner!—  
Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner."  
-Lord Byron_

•

He resisted the calling of steak and lamb. Especially lamb. And boar and hare and veal and quail and pheasant, but especially lamb. He could rightly describe the feeling, when thinking about the lamb dish at dinner à la Russe. At the thought of such an innocent creature as lamb, slaughtered and sliced and served on his plate, devouring its vestal flesh in garnished chop form, he felt a strange mix of joy and satisfaction. Sometimes a bestial, eager hunger, not for nourishment but for destruction. He stopped attending the dinners à la Russe. Humans do not give in to temptation, like a starving wolf in a field of sheep. But he did not yearn to dance with that temptation every night.  
In his own home he ate no meat. Stewed celery, artichokes, and larded sweetbreads constituted his supper, and Charlotte aux Pommes, orange-water ice and plum pudding graced his confection platter.  
Animals with sharp teeth did not indulge in fancy desserts.  
His thinning body craved meat as each night the moon fattened.

Some days a week, once or several, he would attend church. There had been many long years of silence between him and his God, and he wondered if it had been too long. He sat amongst undefiled souls for service, feeling painfully discordant. The words from his lips were prayers, pleads, and petitions for the safety of his soul, even as he felt the growing distance between it and heaven. Each night as the sky opened her heavenly eye further, swollen and pale and almost full, Abberline's soul became steadily blacker. First the silvery gray of alienation as he felt alone in the mass. A cold iron sheen of abandonment when it seemed God had no answer for him. Stony desperation, supplemented by the sooty loss of hope. He knew next would be the dark pitch of aversion and schismatic thoughts, but he did not abandon his weekly pilgrimage.  
Because hell-cursed beasts do not sit in The Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster for Sunday worship.

•

"_Man is the only animal who laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be."  
-William Hazlitt_

•

The moon hung round in the sky. Abberline was unsettled. He immersed himself in his job, spending days in the field and nights in the office, long nights with the windows shuttered and every bulb lit. His colleges, once friends but now distanced, worried and fretted, then forgot and ignored. They used to ask each other, in whispers he shouldn't have been able to hear, 'Was it a tough time in Blackmoor?', or 'Was the Ripper case still haunting his thoughts?' Both were right, and still there were things left unsaid. The fear of the change he knew was coming, the fiendish presence he could no longer omit from his thoughts. Another creature like Ripper, some monstrosity he had no power to stop or ability to control. He turned these useless energies to his profession, fighting the ever-growing sense of futility as he filled in reports. The sand had almost all fallen through his hourglass, and then he would have no time for burglaries or kidnappings.  
Kidnapping; he had just solved one earlier that week. It had been so simple, a crisis not but really an effortless puzzle. Of course the husband had taken the children. Demanded money of his well-off mistress. But how the woman had cried thanked him when the bastard children were delivered back into her care. "God bless you Detective! You have a truly kind soul!" He vainly scribbled away at the papers. A _human_ task, he told himself.  
A throat-tearing brute would not warrant the blessing of a woman off the streets. Wolfmen have no business penning police reports.  
He flung the pen at the wall. His eyes grew moist.

The moon was full, the sun was setting. The door was fortified by the writing desk, and the windows were barred with chairs and tables.  
He had paced and panicked, but his mind was blank. Blissfully empty, he was vaguely aware of, but as he sat staring at his meager fire he wasn't even able to picture the blank slate his thoughts resembled.  
The neighbors in the townhouse one over could hear the screams, then yelps, then howls, as the moon rose.

•  
_Human beings cling to their delicious tyrannies and to their exquisite nonsense, till death stares them in the face.  
-Sydney Smith  
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It was dawn. For one blissful, heavenly moment the world was normal again. Then he opened his eyes all the way, and he saw the remains. His vision was sanguine. He couldn't speak. His clothes were ragged. He was covered in blood, his hands and his face. He felt nauseous and didn't even try to fight it; he vomited, lots of blood, and brownish red chunks, and a finger. Chewed up a bit. He vomited again, on the floor that wasn't his own. He grabbed hold of the table, flung sideways and broken. There were huge splinters of wood sticking out from his arm, jabbed right beneath his skin. At least a good six inches. Blood oozed from the edges; several long dark hairs poked from beneath the skin. He bent to vomit and was surprised to find there still more left in his stomach, more meat this time. Another finger.  
He ground his teeth and collapsed over the table once more.

There was only clarity, as he heard the shuffling of feet from out the broken front door.  
For Talbot it was fate. Disgusting, controlling, unavoidable fate. Lawrence had no choice because it was his role to be broken and at the end he knew and accepted. Francis knew this even as he squatted, the antique wooden table digging into his ribs.  
Lawrence couldn't accept the path decided for him the moment his own father was bitten, and the curse forced him to face that path.  
Now Abberline could see the truth. He had been mistaken about his humanity. He had been no closer to it hiding away in the huge city than if he had been back in the forests of Blackmoor. Working and dressing as he had could not and did not prolong the change.  
Abberline coughed but did not throw up. He edged over the table awkwardly, fell back, struggled with gravity, fell forward. Landed in a body, surprisingly whole. Fingers missing, probably those soaking into the wood on the other side of the table. Throat missing, possibly still his disturbingly full stomach. Blood everywhere, but the pale, graying skin he knew could belong only to a corpse. He crawled through it. The new stains were hardly distinguishable from the old on what was left of his trousers. The blood was cold on his chest and palms. He took the pistol from the man's hands.  
His demons, he reflected. His humanity. What had he thought it was?  
Humans, he had been sure, were above instinct. Not bloody animals who didn't act on thoughts, be reacted to feelings. Abberline had resisted, feeling the curse take precious humanity from his mind with each passing night. Now, holding the gun in his hand, cocking it, discovering it still had shots, he knew that wasn't quite true.

That was his inner fiend, then. Cool action had been his staple, but his life lacked depth. Reaction. True humanity.  
Humanity, he mused, that fundamental, essential trait, is what many humans had already lost. It wasn't resisting temptation, but giving in to it.  
Giving in. Giving up. Only humans gave up. That was the key, the point, the cosmic purpose of what little life remained for him. Give up. The struggle was useless and pointless. It wouldn't, couldn't change anything. He put the gun to his forehead. Not special bullets. But he was human now, in form and, finally, in mind. It would work.

It wasn't about stealing the strength of his humanity, but embracing its weakness. He pulled the trigger.

End, Francis Abberline.

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_____Our behavior is human with a sliver of animal, our souls animal with a sliver of human._  
_-Carrie Latet_

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_Prompt # 102 Only Human_


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